First to understand the basic concept that bitcoin is P2P cash – money that can be used anywhere in the world anytime, without permission, pseudonymously – it is best to own some, so you can see that it works.
Go to coinos.io, set up an account, whatsapp me the username and I will send you some sats.
1 – Intro to Bitcoin
I would go through these individual linked suggestions first before going down the rabbit hole, because all these people have dozens of podcasts that go way deeeeep.
The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfxHtrVT7Zg He understands bitcoin and fiat economics.
Intro to Bitcoin – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0 Andreas was the original educator and for the most part all his videos are still clear and accurate
Michael Saylor 21 rules of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/1PkMFIa7rmQ?feature=shared&t=133 2025 A summary of what is now understood of Bitcoin. He is the guy who owns 500k btc and will never sell/ burn his own keys. Gigachad
Bitcoin Season 1 through 5 from Adam Back the Hashcash inventor and the first person Satoshi emailed on a cypherpunk forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Qe1CZssek
Full history of Bitcoin from 2009 to 2019 with Max and Stacey
Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth explains how you can’t re-price from inside the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWvYbk45aYg
2 – Bitcoin for the 8 billion, not just the already rich Westerners.
- https://anitaposch.com/ Anita is introducing bitcoin to Africa.
- https://alexgladstein.com/essays/ Human Rights Foundation – bitcoin as humantarian money
Game Theory
Bitcoin operates on principles that can be understood through Game Theory. Any attempts to dominate the system ultimately lead to humbling experiences, as the underlying mathematics and structure prevent any single entity from gaining control. There is no need or chance to trust anyone when transacting in BTC. The code deals with all transactions, no hidden agenda. Therefore each individual is equal in terms of the Bitcoin they manage, own or earn. And Bitcoin has the potential to enrich all participants. As Bitcoin becomes scarcer, the rich will drive up its price, benefiting all holders globally.
Too late? Never.
Currently, we are in the early stages of Bitcoin’s adoption, currently 2 trillion worth of dollars in the battery with a projected addressable market of 200 to 400 trillion. Bitcoin appreciates 50% a year if you hold it for 4 years or more. The potential for mind-boggling growth is built into the system for the next decade and beyond.
Hodling
Hodling is the most powerful and simplest investment option, bar none.
If you have a good business idea you need to be assured at least a 50% return every year to beat the simplicity of putting your cash investment straight into BTC, holding on to it for 5 years and get a simple job to pay the bills in the meantime.
Unlike a Ponzi, as we move toward a world that embraces a Bitcoin standard, we will collectively engage in a stable, deflationary economic system. This system is certain, and rewards responsible behavior—encouraging us to avoid excessive consumption, gambling, and conflict, while promoting the use of abundant, genuinely clean energy and maximisiing our time outside of earning a living.
3 – Bitcoin mining
Mining 101 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=452ykF03Taw
Bitcoin miners unearth the bitcoin every 10 minutes block by block. The nodes ie the computers with the bitcoin code installed, keep the miners honest. ie the nodes, the users worldwide dictate by 51% concensus what miners are allowed to do. The financial cost of breaking the rules and the nodes refusing to sign off a new block is such that it prevents miners from cheating – most of the time!
Mining started with 50 btc reward per block (not 1000 oops, my bad memory) and every 4 years that reward halves, coinciding with rising network adoption rates. (Every 12.7% of its life adoption doubles).
Half of all bitcoin was mined in the first 4 years, a strategy believed to ensure maximum adoption across the widest demographic of the plebs. Now 19.8 million have been mined and now the nation states and Blackrocks have arrived, but only 3.25 btc/block so a supply shock is in store.
Bitcoin is valuable because it costs to mine it. Just think gold. That process is known as Proof of Work. Anyone who says Bitcoin is funny money doesn’t understand the difference between an asset and a security.
Bitcoin and energy
Bitcoin miners are driving the build out of efficient and clean energy production. https://cointelegraph.com/explained/bitcoin-miners-as-energy-buyers-explained
At over 40% mined from renewables, it is already the greenest industry in the world – not perfect yet but incentivised to continually drive development. Bitcoin miners seek out cheapest rates and stranded (worthless) energy supplies to convert into financial energy locked into the battery and stored forever.
- https://gridlesscompute.com/ Gridless are the African miners acting as the buyer of last resort to fund building out electricity infrastructure in inaccessible communities
- https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=bitcoin+methane+miners&ia=web
- the energy nirvana appears to be the development of mini nuclear power stations as the safest cleanest most abundant energy source.
- Ercot is the Texas electric co using Bitcoin miners to rebalance the grid (National power supply is extremely complex and 99% of us think we have a handle on how we can turn a light on and it always works, but the systems to deliver electricity is up there with rocket science. And you can go down that rabbit hole and start to understand the absurdity of ideas like net zero, or finding virtue in reducing energy consumption as a way to make the world a better place etc.
4 – Bitcoin philosophy
Troy Cross https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vROP40L9Bg Philosopher, other names mentioned.
https://brandonquittem.com/bitcoin-is-the-mycelium-of-money/
Robert Breedlove https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrehEWYj16s
The academics – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlG9pfjfi0o
5 – Women are the predominant educators in bitcoin
Bitcoin Policy Institute is a US volunteer collective of bitcoiners explaining to US legislators why they must let bitcoin develop
Natalie Smolenski https://youtu.be/VpP5NrQarrs?feature=shared&t=100
Margot Paez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9n7BJK48dk
In the UK https://bitcoinpolicy.uk/our-team
Anita Posch spreading bitcoin in Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9n7BJK48dk
Lyn Alden financial analyst, not always a bitcoiner, on why you need to get out the current fiat system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giuzcd4oxIk
DJ Valerie is very cool. https://djvalerieblove.substack.com/
6 – Bitcoin Core code
Maintainers,- developers elected by the original and ongoing pool of cypherpunk adopters to tweak Satoshi’s Open Source Code so Bitcoin always works as intended and always backwards compatible even when new tech hardware and operating systems come along. Any code changes have to be approved by 51% of node operators, ie the plebs worldwide with computers storing their copy of the core Bitcoin protocol code. If they don’t approve, the changes can’t be made, nobody can force the nodes to update the code. The nodes outrank the miners when It comes to approving changes. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/gloria-zhao-first-female-bitcoin-core-maintainer/ Not just bloke developers!
The Fork Wars
Self interest seems to ensure that nodes don’t vote to jeopardise the way Bitcoin works. But when someone tries to hijack Bitcoin – Recommended history lesson is the 2017 Bitcoin Blocksize Wars where miners tried to change the number of transactions on a bitcoin block to their benefit only. The existential threat got very ugly and it was literally touch and go if btc would even survive. BTC is the ticker invented for Satoshis original code.
Understanding hard forks – when concensus gets complicated
Bitcoin is Open Source so anyone can download it, edit it and market it as their own.
A bitcoin hard fork is when a network of btc users splits into 2 camps and each camp acts according to the rules of its own version of “bitcoin”. The original Satoshi version BTC prevailed in 2017 and has never looked back, while the other two forked versions have gone nowhere even though they literally contain the same code plus a couple of tweaks. ie BCash Bitcoin Cash and BSV Bitcoin Satoshi Vision are “bitcoin” without the BTC benefits: network effect, a global army of developers watching the code like a hawk, a history, the ideology etc. Even using the same code as BTC they are failures!
A soft fork is when concensus says that everyone accepts that a change to the code is needed eg to make an update for current hardware advances or when use cases allowable in the existing code become obvious. When quantum computing poses a risk, the code is already waiting to be implemented to protect the btc network and over the next few years will be discussed, analysed, stress tested and then proposed to the community as an upgrade. That will be a soft fork. The same userbase and same block history is basically untouched and everyone agrees to the change.
8 – Bitcoin as money
There is a rule that bad money always runs to good money. There can only be one winner in digital money – perfect money! So per Fork Wars BCash hard fork experience, it should be clear how all the other cryptocurrencies with CEOs claiming to be as good as bitcoin can never come close in the internet of money race.
The thousands of crypto companies using blockchain ledger tech to handle tokens may be able to outdo the current bank payments system, maybe, but they can only use euros and dollars, or tokens backed by euros and dollar, so they aren’t addressing the core issues of “fiat money is broken” . They are just finding ways to make it easier to use shit money that is messing up our world.
It seems that BTC is so well conceived, it is not just a savings technology (a store of value) but as the original whitepaper, a P2P cash system. Every day it facilitates the transfer of 30-60 billion dollars across the world 24/7 for fractions of the cost of bank services. It also backstops Lightning, a layer 2 payments system ie a network that plugs into the core bitcoin layer one rules. It is already faster and more secure than Visa. Its how I send sats to coinos. So there is only one money winner on the cards!
9 – Bitcoin FUD
The community of cyberhornets remind adversaries that Bitcoin is antifragile ie it invites attack, “knowing” it will always win, however determined the adversaries. It takes the attackers energy, adapts and carries on. Greenpeace and China, US Govts, banks, media have all tried to discredit, even ban it. Now US has adopted it. The corporates have arrived with billions to invest, when there is hardly any Bitcoin being mined now. 2-300 million Chinese own it even though it is banned, and https://cointelegraph.com/news/chinese-bitcoin-miners-control-55-of-network
Energy consumption by sector, including the financial system, expressed as approximate percentages of total global energy consumption:
Industrial Manufacturing: ~30-35%
Transportation: ~25-30%
Residential Heating and Cooling: ~15-20%
Commercial Buildings: ~10-15%
Data Centers: ~2-3%
Financial System: ~2-3%
Christmas Lights: ~0.1-0.2%
Bitcoin Mining: ~0.5-1%
Agriculture: ~2-5%Bottom line the market decides what energy is used for. Nobody can say you cant use your electric for Xmas lights, but the market can decide do we need a gazillion bank branches and their infrastructure built 30 years ago, or shall we run bitcoin and have everyone with a phone app being their own sovereign bank with immutable money.
Some claims of Bitcoin FUD that have been disproven or shown wildly exaggerated:
Bitcoin is used for illegal activities.
Bitcoin is bad for the environment.
Bitcoin is a bubble.
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin will be banned globally.Greenpeace’s efforts to discredit Bitcoin were significantly funded by Chris Larsen, the co-founder of Ripple. In March 2022, he donated $5 million to Greenpeace USA to support the “Change the Code” campaign, which aimed to pressure the Bitcoin community to alter its code to reduce its environmental impact. This campaign was framed around the argument that Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism was harmful to the environment and that a shift to a less energy-intensive model, like proof-of-stake (PoS), was necessary.
(PoS is how the current financial system works, securities run by a few stakeholders out to cream off the userbase by stealth. eg Ethereum.
This is an example of a hater who says BTC has no use case, but never heard of Lightning wallets. https://expatmadrid.com/bitcoin-barcelona/
10 – Memes
all signal, no noise
Bitcoin is for your enemies
first they laugh at you, then ignore you, then fight you, then you win
11 – Is BTC useful now?
It takes planning right to live on bitcoin now, because we are still in a mega transistional phase, but its getting easier all the time to conceive of living on a bitcoin standard!
- Earn BTC.
If you earn in btc and need to live! convert what you need to euros straightaway and spend it. Save the rest for at least 4 years. Therefore even in the current system you don’t experience daily volatility or cap gains because you don’t make a profit on that immediate exchange from btc to euros.
If you store the excess through one 4-year cycle you just log gains and only pay cap gains if you sell it. But every year the ability to use btc as collateral for a tax free loan increases as new services evolve ( Thank the rich bitcoiners for insights into the rich persons playbook on how to protect your wealth.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/mauriciodibartolomeo/2025/06/30/the-difference-between-bitcoin-mortgages-and-bitcoin-backed-loans/
- To find people who will pay you in btc or accept BTC for food, rent, houses…
Ask friends, local businesses if they are up for it.
Join Nostr (download Amethyst app, and network with users, most of whom are committed bitcoiners who will not just pay for your writing services in BTC if you ask, they will also tip your good informational social media posts. Invite you on podcasts, help you out.
OrangePill app https://www.orangepillapp.com/ is a community of people and merchants that accept BTC.
Places with atms or merchants eg Barcelona https://btcmap.org/map#14/41.37623/2.15246
To spend BTC mainstream
Buy gift cards for Amazon or any mainstream business in btc on Bitrefill.